My student Mon-Shane, the same wonderful person who has recorded and uploaded a number of my women’s history lectures, points me to this piece from the ever-reliable Ann Friedman in today’s online Prospect: It’s Not the End of Men. Friedman is responding to this Hanna Rosin piece in the Atlantic, another offering from those who are convinced that feminism, cultural shifts, and economic transformation have led to a terrible crisis for American men. Friedman:

The latest contribution to the masculinity-crisis meme is “The End of Men,” a cover story in this month’s Atlantic by Hanna Rosin. Women are outperforming men in schools, at work, and at home, she argues. The global economy is shifting in such a way that it favors “female” characteristics, and male-dominated industries such as manufacturing, construction and finance are declining. “As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as keys to economic success,” she writes, “those societies that take advantage of the talents of all their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest.” What if, she asks, “the economics of the new era are better suited to women?”

It’s disappointing that, despite a history of sharp observations about gender and 5,000 words to work with, Rosin makes the same oversight as all of the other hand-wringing articles about the state of the American male. She thinks the problem is men; really, it’s traditional gender stereotypes. The narrow, toxic definition of masculinity perpetuated by Rosin and others — that men are brawn not brains, doers not feelers, earners not nurturers — is actually to blame for the crisis.

The goal of feminism was, first and foremost, to win rights and freedoms for women. While changing men was never the primary focus of any wave of the movement, feminists of both sexes have long understood that egalitarianism is not a zero-sum game. Feminism offers men something of tremendous value: the opportunity to escape at last the suffocating straitjacket of traditional masculinity. As feminists have long pointed out, and as serious science and comparative anthropology have made clear, that straitjacket is a cultural construct, not an immutable biological reality. As I said in 2007,

I’m a feminist because I want to create a world where men and women alike can realize their potential; I’m a feminist because I believe that our potential is not directed or confined by our chromosomes or our secondary sex organs. My penis and my Y chromosome do not destine me to be unreliable, predatory, and emotionally inarticulate. My wife’s uterus and her estrogen do not limit the horizons of her professional or athletic ambition. Feminism is, as we’ve all heard, the radical notion that women are people. But it’s also the radical notion that men are people too, complete human beings, with the same range of emotions and the same capacity for empathy and self-control as any woman.

We’re all in agreement that modernity poses a challenge to traditional gender roles. To the historian, of course, the point is that it has never not been so: the sense that we are only now entering a prolonged period of masculine uncertainty is rooted in a false nostalgia for a time that never really was. As Michael Kimmel and others have shown, masculinity has always been “in crisis”. Generations of American men have complained of feeling “emasculated” by assertive women (read Rip Van Winkle sometime); a century ago, social conservatives fretted that co-education would make men irrelevant. The one constant from generation to generation is the keen anxiety that masculinity is fragile, perpetually at risk, always in need of protection from the encroaching and emasculating effects of luxury, intellectualism, and feminism.

None of us deny that the new economy has left many men — particularly working-class men — feeling bewildered and disheartened. The shift from a manufacturing model to a service and information model has brought instability and high levels of unemployment, particularly among men who don’t have a college education. But the same anxieties to which Rosin points were found nearly two centuries ago, as industrialization meant an end to a way of life for millions who defined themselves as artisans and farmers during the agrarian age. The discombobulation and uncertainty that defines contemporary men is an old story, not a new phenomenon. In the 1800s, farmers and blacksmiths had to become office clerks and factory workers; they were forced indoors (into a traditionally female space). And they coped, mostly by adapting themselves to new economic and social realities. (For example, men who had once built muscles naturally through manual labor now built them in gyms and through sports. The games that had once been considered childish — like running around with a bat and ball – became all important signifiers of adult manhood. The point is, masculinity is highly adaptable, and to its critics, remarkably difficult to kill.)

Friedman shares that same well-founded optimism for men’s capacity to adapt:

Perhaps the answer lies in the success of high-achieving women. In previous generations, women busted all sorts of gender stereotypes in order to get their piece of the economic pie. While there were various schools of thought among feminists about how to best make the case for hiring women, all involved reshaping popular notions about women’s abilities. Women could be firefighters and floor traders, CEOs and carpenters. The best man for the job just might be a woman, or so the 1970s slogan went.

It’s long past time we also acknowledge that the best woman for the job might just be a man.

Indeed. Shaped by a shifting culture and driven by economic necessity, the next generation of male workers at every class level will show the willingness and the enthusiasm to move into what were traditionally female professions. I see it in the increasingly egalitarian attitudes of my working-class community college students, where the number of young men interested in professions like education or nursing has begun (slowly, it must be admitted) to rise. Feminists have long suspected what reason and experience and science all show, that testosterone is not an impediment to empathy and that the the possession of a Y chromosome needn’t hinder the development of emotional and verbal intelligence.

Men are not weak. I make that case over and over again. But there’s a corollary to the myth of male weakness: the myth of male inflexibility. It suggests that unlike women, men are too rigid to adapt to a changing culture. It suggests that extricating oneself from the straitjacket of traditional masculinity is more difficult than escaping the corset of traditional femininity. And whether this incapacity is consciously feigned or sincerely believed, it’s rooted in a myth rather than a reality. If feminism alone can’t get men to develop their own emotional and vocational dexterity, then we can be certain that the inexorable realities of global economic patterns will accomplish the task. It has always been that way in the past, and will surely be so again.